Handy Warhaul: Shopping Bags as Art

They seem as natural as an artificial Christmas tree, but piles of shopping bags haven’t always come at the end of a long day out at the mall. Like everything in our material world, shopping bags have a colorful history in their very brown-and-white past.

Here at Winterthur, we have an unusual shopping bag in our collection: a 1966 white kraft paper bag with a silkscreen print by Andy Warhol on its front. This bag’s simple material (paper) has been used as a wrapper for goods for centuries, while its design (a day-glo Campbell’s Soup can) is stridently Pop-Art, foreshadowing the vibrant shopping bags we see today.

Up through the 16th century, most trade was done locally and conducted in bulk, leaving very little need for any packaging on the consumer end. People making purchases from local shops and markets brought their own containers (think baskets, jugs, crates), or, more likely, they had products delivered when needed.

Andy Warhol, Campbell’s Soup Can (Tomato) 1966, Screenprint on shopping bag, 19 ¼” x 17”; image, 16 x 9”, Edition of unknown number, Printer unknown, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Publisher

As towns and cities grew, urban dwellers were less likely to purchase goods in bulk, and shopkeepers began to wrap small purchases in heavy paper; pages bought from bookbinders of manuscripts that failed to sell as reading material. By the 19th Century in American, printers sold wrapping paper printed with the name of the business or shopkeeper specifically for transporting goods out of the store with the shopper.

Women with baskets shopping watercolor over pencil, John Lewis Krimmel 1786-1821, collection 308, Accession 59×5.2p.5, Courtesy The Winterthur Library

From left to right: C. E. Harris and Co. paper Bag, c. 1880s, Grossman Collection, Winterthur; Miss M. L. Sherman Fine Millinery, Paper bag, c. 1880, Grossman Collection, Winterthur;

By the middle of the 19th century, paper makers were producing both wrapping paper and handmade paper bags, both with letterpress printing customized for each client. These bags rarely have side flaps (known as gussets) or flat bottoms, but were simply folded and pasted paper, made with either two side seams or one middle and one bottom seam.

Arcade [Philadelphia] 1833 Lithograph, 7 ¼ x 11” Proof state George Lehman, artist, Childs & Inman, publisher

Just as likely, a shopper would still bring their own containers with them to the dry goods emporium or the fancy goods shop. A visitor to Philadelphia’s Arcade, the first covered shopping “mall” in America, might have brought a band-box. These boxes were rigid and made of glued paper board and scrap wall papers, often with a string to wear them over the shoulder. Imagine trying to navigate a busy street with your band-box, to and from the shops!

Bandbox, Date, Winterthur Museum

The Arcade, with its almost eighty stores over two stories, was replaced by the end of the century with ever larger department stores. From the Civil War through the Great Depression, shoppers at any store–large or small–typically had their purchases (even small ones) delivered directly to their homes. Fashionable gentlemen and ladies would only select their wares in the store; payment and acquisition were handled at another time.

It wasn’t until the 1930s that machines that could fold and paste a bag, add handles, and print onto a bag were developed. But the technology was rudimentary, and bags tended to be rather dreary affairs in a limited range of sizes.

Things hadn’t changed much when Andy Warhol commissioned the Guild Paper Company in the Bronx to produce a limited number of bags for his exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, which opened in October 1966. The plain white bag, made of Kraft paper with a flat bottom but no side gussets, was screenprinted with an electrifying day-glo Campbell’s Tomato Soup can. These bags left the show as little portable Warhols; the one in Winterthur’s collection was the gift of the Guild Paper Company in 1996.

Warhol’s bag signalled an explosion of bag design in the late 1960s, as more sophisticated printing presses and folding mechanisms made more complicated bag designs easier to produce. As observed by the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, by the end of the 60s, ““All at once, or so it seemed, many ordinary products of everyday life–record jackets, book covers, menus, shopping bags, and packaging of all kinds, sprouted new and vivacious graphic qualities.” With the introduction of four-color flexography in 1982, photographic-quality printing directly onto the surface of the bag was possible. Technology also greatly reduced the overhead cost of bag production, making it easy for stores to have limited runs of bags seasonally.

Bags in the 1980s and 90s were riots of color and frenetic design, reflecting the booming economic times and the heyday of mall-going American culture. Shopping bags were advertisements, both of the store and of the good taste of the consumer carrying it. They were so ubiquitous, and so popular, the Smithsonian Institute launched a travelling exhibition of shopping bags, “Portable Graphic Art,” which ran for five years in the 1980s in over fifty North American locations–usually malls.

But what about bags today? As stores have become ever more conscious of their complete “brand identity,” bags have been incorporated into the total look of the store. The shopping bag is a physical extension of the store’s architecture, sales’ teams wardrobe, website design, and overall feel of the brand. Gone are the freewheeling designs of the 80s and 90s as discreet pieces of graphic design in and of themselves. Today’s bags are generally sleek, minimal, and understated yet self aware. [or Today’s bags feature a clean, minimal look, their understated design perhaps suggesting a more assured sense of status/class.}

Below is a gallery of just some of the bags a shopper can pick up at the King of Prussia mall outside Philadelphia. In looking at these bags in a virtual gallery, think about how they function as art objects. If we consider the Andy Warhol shopping bag above to be art, can we extrapolate that any shopping bag has the potential to be art? I think it is worth considering these objects existing beyond just as utilitarian or promotional items.